Richard Heinberg is one of the world’s most effective communicators on the urgent need for the world to transition to a sustainable future. He takes a big picture perspective of the interconnectedness of economics, energy, and the environment in his latest book.
Here is an extended excerpt from the first chapter. Links to additional and related media are included at the end.We are, and will be, seeing a cavalcade of environmental and economic disasters, not obviously related to one another, that will stymie economic growth in more and more ways….Each will be typically treated as a special case, a problem to be solved so that we can get “back to normal.” But in the final analysis, they are all related, in that they are consequences of growing human population striving for higher per-capita consumption of limited resources, all on a finite and fragile planet…The result: we are seeing a perfect storm of converging crises that together represent a watershed moment in the history of our species. We are witnesses to, and participants in, the transition from decades of economic growth to decades of economic contraction… This book will argue that growth is over because of a convergence of three factors—resource depletion, environmental impacts, and systemic financial and monetary failures. However, a single factor may be playing a key role in bringing the age of expansion to a close. That factor is oil.…The Industrial Revolution was really the Fossil Fuel Revolution, and the entire phenomenon of continuous economic growth…is ultimately based on ever-increasing supplies of cheap energy……In September 2008, the global financial system nearly collapsed. The reasons for this sudden, gripping crisis apparently had to do with housing bubbles, lack of proper regulation of the banking industry, and the over-use of bizarre financial products that almost nobody understood. However, the oil price spike had played a critical (if largely overlooked) role in initiating the economic meltdown…Meanwhile, the debate about what to do to rein in global climate change exemplified the political inertia that had kept the world on track for calamity since the early ’70s. It had by now become obvious to nearly every person of modest education and intellect that the world has two urgent, incontrovertible reasons to rapidly end its reliance on fossil fuels: the twin threats of climate catastrophe and impending constraints to fuel supplies. Yet at the Copenhagen climate conference in December, 2009, the priorities of the most fuel-dependent nations were clear: carbon emissions should be cut, and fossil fuel dependency reduced, but only if doing so does not threaten economic growth.The end of growth is a very big deal indeed. It means the end of an era, and of our current ways of organizing economies, politics, and daily life. Without growth, we will have to virtually reinvent human life on Earth.
- Richard Heinberg, The End of Growth
The End of Oil – chapter summaries and excerpts at The Post Carbon Institute
Videos by Richard Heinberg (about 6 minutes each)
300 Years of Fossil Fuels in 300 Seconds / Who Killed Economic Growth
Interview of Nate Higgins on ChrisMartenson.com
This is riveting, in-depth discussion of our economic, environmental, and societal predicament. If you have the time, this really ties it all together. Until recently, Nate Higgins was lead editor of The Oil Drum, one of the most popular and highly-respected websites for the analysis and discussion and global energy supplies, and the future implications of the energy decline that we are facing. He holds a Master’s Degree in Finance from the University of Chicago and recently completed his PhD in Natural Resources at the University of Vermont. Previously, he was President of Sanctuary Asset Management and a Vice-President at the investment firm Solomon Brothers and Lehman Brothers.

by Keith Weiner After President Nixon’s gold default in 1971, many people advocated a return to the gold standard. One argument has been repeated: consumer prices are rising. While this is true, it wasn’t compelling in the 1970’s and it certainly doesn’t fire people up today. Rising prices—what most people think of as inflation—is a dead-end, politically. People care about rising prices, but not that much.

Coal will nearly overtake oil as the dominant energy source by 2017, and only a drop in world gas prices could curb the use of the dirtier fossil fuel in the absence of high carbon prices, the International Energy Agency said.
The IEA, the energy agency for developed countries, said earlier this year that without a major shift away from coal, average global temperatures could rise by 6 degrees Celsius by 2050, leading to devastating climate change.

Kim Kyung-Hoon/ReutersChina will keep national annual water consumption below 670 billion cubic meters (bcm) through to 2020, the state planning agency said on Wednesday, part of efforts to ease chronic regional shortages by cutting waste and boosting efficiency.

Over at Equitable Growth: When you think about it, broadly speaking, the question of why we have seen such huge rises in the real wages of labor--of bare, unskilled labor not boosted by expensive and lengthy investments in upgrading what it can do--is somewhat puzzling. READ MOAR

Submitted by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog, How low can and will oil prices go, and what will the effects of those prices be? I bet you’ll have a hard time finding even just two people who have the same opinion on that. Not that it’s merely a matter of opinion, mind you, there are a great number of real life factors that come into play. It’s not an easy game.

Submitted by Gail Tverberg via Our Finite World blog, How long can economic growth continue in a finite world? This is the question the 1972 book The Limits to Growth by Donella Meadows and others sought to answer. The computer models that the team of researchers produced strongly suggested that the world economy would collapse sometime in the first half of the 21st century.

Where others see a U.S. energy revolution of cheap and abundant fuel, David Hughes sees a short-term bubble that will bring higher economic and environmental costs.
The Canadian geoscientist, founder of the consultancy Global Sustainability Research, is part of a movement pushing back against conventional wisdom that the U.S. is on the verge of energy independence amid surging oil output and a 100-year supply of natural gas.